Creative Time Reports Drops a Well-Lettered Sugar-rush Just in Time for Kara Walker's Marvelous Saturday

So, uh... what are your plans this Saturday?

We hope that your schedule is light and sweet because Kara Walker, at the behest of Creative Time, will unveil her first-ever, large-scale public art project entitled "A Subtlety--or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant" at the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, NYC.

In honor of Walker's powerful new work, Creative Time Reports is publishing poets and prose writers's meditations on the price of harvesting and manufacturing sugar. Participating writers range from Edwidge Danticat to Tracy K. Smith. So much goodness to read! Learn more-- and don't forget to visit Walker's Marvelous Sugar Baby, who will be unveiled tomorrow in NYC! We'll post Tracy K. Smith's writing in response to a photograph of Jamaican sugar cane plantation workers, right here:

I would be standing there, too,
Standing, then made to leap up
Into the air, made to curl
And heave and cringe and
I would want to live so badly
I would wreck myself trying to
Cradle that speck of something
That speck that weighs and sits
And turns and grows and
Cries out to itself cries out
Lord! or No! I would be
Standing there like those men
Or bent down like that woman
Bent in half in the foreground
And I would pray oh I would pray
To my hands and to the god
Of cane and of shade and of
All that is taller than us.

The sky
That caps them is spiked with stalks.
No one talks. They stare
At a man I cannot see, whose gaze
Has conjured me. It is he
Who told them to stand—and
Told that one woman to drop
Back to her work so we might
Scrutinize the cut leaves
That bury her feet. A man’s mouth
Open, mute as halved fruit.
All that is said without breath
Or pitch. What lives blind
To that high white sky.
What tunnels and creeps—
An itch beneath the skin,
The names of distant kin—
Eluding the man and me
And our camera’s greedy lens.

Why not read a little, before getting your art on? --at Creative Time Reports!